Ericsson R&D pulls out of Coventry Ericsson is pulling out of its R&D facility at Ansty Park, jeopardising 700 jobs in the process, despite only moving in six months ago. Seven hundred employees will be affected by the shutting down of the site, which is expected to be completed by the middle of next year - union negotiations not withstanding. Ericsson expects …
Well thank goodness we have an unelected Business Sec to make sure things like this don't happen.
Oh wait.......
Well I guess it can become yet another enterprise centre or failing that we can always give it away to somebody else to set up a hand car wash in.
Vote! for a change
I remember the gubermint telling us that there was a drive to get everyone well educated so that we'd be able to have those 'value added' highly skilled jobs. The implication was that China, Indonesia and India etc. were incapable of providing people with suitable skills or intellect. Apart from a strong whiff of racism, it was plainly rubbish then, and can be shown to be rubbish now, because they can compete on price regardless of the skill set required.
Still, I hear Sainsbury are going to be hiring...
Nice and shiny but far to expensive but it looks like a ghost town even down to some rubbish blowing about tumbeweed style. Wow only there 6 months before closing it, I wonder what tax right off this will give them.
What R&D remains will be relocated to "lower cost-base countries". Hmmm china then right next to where they build them.
As seems to be the case, everyone blames ericsson or the company in question for closing down.
One would hope if the decision wasn't taken lightly.
People need to realise that the UK is expensive, and labour even more so. That makes any facility in this country a great big target for 'cost cutting'.
Something needs to be done to bring everything down in cost. I'm not talking abolish minimum wage... i don't actually know the solution.
"Agilent built a fantastic new $20 million facility on the outskirts of Ipswich and never even moved in - suffice to say it's still available for purchase / rent."
Agilent built a fantastic walls and a roof. It's not finished and would cost a couple of quid to finish. No raised floors, no wiring, no decoration. It does have a nice view from the roof though.
Worse that that.
They can and do compete on education nowdays. At least with the UK.
However, that is not the point. You do not innovate in a low cost of labour country. You implement an innovation there.
Innovation in telecoms however itself, however is presently created in places with way higher cost of labour and cost of living than UK - USA West Coast, Israel, etc.
That is for a reason. The cost of labour and living there is high because of employers compete for labour. People there can and do tell a manager NO and stand up and leave straight away if they do not like the going. They are immediately hired by the competitor across the road. This is actively encouraged by legislation which makes non-compete agreements, notice periods, etc illegal and allows an employee to walk out straight away. It is a deliberate choice - EMC is always across the road from Storagetech, Google across the road from Microsoft, Sun across the road from IBM and so on.
If you want successful R&D that is the environment you need - you need people who will be able stand up to their ideas and you need people to be rewarded for their ideas. You do not get that in a low cost economy and you do not get that in most telecoms centers in the UK which are specificially chosen to reside in low (by UK standard) cost economies. There is no other employer to go to across the road. In Ipswich you have the choice of BT or BT. In Coventry the choice was Ericsson or Ericsson.
If Ericsson wanted to be innovative it should have built it across the road from Juniper or Cisco in the M4 corridor or at worst in Ipswich. However they showed themselves to be clueless cost cutting twats. As Nortel has shown - it does not take a lot of that to bring down a company so we should be looking for Ericsson on joining it ASAP.
The really large companies might have gone seriously off plan, but smaller UK technology companies such as Imagination Technologies have been hiring throughout the recession. As for how to make the UK more competitive, perhaps start by getting rid of the many layers of red tape and regulations, and ditching stealth taxes such as Employer's NI, but don't hold your breath.
Serious question.
GEC Coventry used to employ thousands of people in jobs ranging from production to admin to development before Weinstock and his successors ran it into the ground (and did some stupid things like buying Fore and Raltec at the top of the dot con boom, because GEC hadn't done any worthwhile R+D for the last couple of decades and were therefore at risk of missing out on the boom).
I last visited that site when GEC shares were worth about 2p rather than the £10+ of their prime.
What's left of that site and its employees these days?
"how to make the UK more competitive, perhaps start by getting rid of the many layers of red tape and regulations"
I think you'd find in many UK companies that it's not the regulations that are the issue, it's the many layers of non-value-added (and indeed often value-obstructing) management. Dilbert's not meant to be a training course for them, but...
Some readers, especially those in corporate software environments, may have heard of CMMI.
A few readers may have heard of Finkelstein's Immaturity paper. Finkelstein seems entirely appropriate for some places I know (obviously not my current employers, just to be clear):
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/A.Finkelstein/papers/immaturity.pdf
"Level 0 organisations perceive their primary technical problem to be software development environments and repositories. With a suitable environment they can, they believe, enforce their policies and processes consistently. They can prescribe standards for and control all documentation. In such an environment they will be able to be able to plug in tools which conform to a complex public tool interface or better still develop their own.
Level -1 organisations while acting in such a way as to prevent software being developed sincerely believe that they are assisting. Level -2 lunatic organisations are contemptuous of advances in software development. They do not care if they produce poor software as they will probably make more money maintaining systems than developing them in the first place. Level -2 organisations have no individuals who know or understand anything about the software development process having dismissed them or promoted them to administrative positions away from software development. Level -2 organisations have a manual describing their software process written many years ago by a software engineer who has long since left the firm." (etc)
Four years ago, the remnants of GEC Coventry were split into a company called Telent, based in Warwick, and Ericsson Coventry. Once they've closed the Ansty site, Telent will be all that remains of the old GEC.
It's all a bit sad, but there you go. I'm sure Tesco still need shelf stackers...
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